Post Your Funniest Old Shame

Many.

I seem to remember one Neopets story, largely stolen from The Taggerung and one Neopian Times story that I particularly liked. I got a couple of chapters into it, was inordinately proud, and then abandoned it because I had no frickin' clue what to do next. Many of my stories ended this way.

It involved the main character's little lupe brother getting kidnapped by a gang of thieves called the DesertRaiders, CamelCase and all, during a trip to Sakhmet, and then being raised as an assassin with a suitably stupid name and going on assassin-trips with his kacheek, ruki, and gelert assassin friends with suitably stupid names. And his surrogate father, who was supposed to be the leader of the DesertRaiders (snerk) and this big, menacing, imposing figure, was an elephante. Which, for those who don't know, looks like a big goofy cartoon elephant with a head jewel, teeny tiny wings, and a rabbit tail. Yes.

Add in awful sentence structure, some random-ass subplot involving some random-ass aisha resident of Sakhmet, who basically existed to go 'Oh, no! The DesertRaiders!' and then proceeded to age from a little girl to an old woman during the ten-year timeskip, random-ass angst, random-ass gay-bashing (unfortunately most of the people I spent my early life around had some... backwards views; as a result I was a hateful, bigoted little child and most of my early stories ran rampant with Unfortunate Implications), and prose, plot, and characters heavily influenced by all the worst parts of Redwall.

Yes.

Pretty much the only mitigating factor I can think of is that, sentence structure aside, my grammar was actually pretty good for an eight-year-old.

edited 11th Dec '12 3:39:41 PM by CarnivorousMoogle

Jeezus. Almost anything I wrote when I was a huge fanboy of Bionicle. The way BZ Power had the fan-fic pages organized, there were Epics, which were Multi-chapter, Short Stories (and songs and poetry and similar one-installment pieces), and comedies.

I liked the comedies when I decided to start writing. The first was this astoundingly stupid one, with toys that came to life. Most were in script, so I followed suite. There was a second script, but it mostly screwed up and did not get past the first post.

Then, finally, was my magnum opus. It was written in prose, and was a kinda self-insert. But, it was mostly all original characters (sorta), with the diminishing cameo gag of a reaul Bionicle character. In fact, it was called 'My Fictional Life'. Yeah, I never came up with a goddamn title! I had it subtitled to Dawn, but that was it. My concept starting off was quickly abandoned, which was the cast slipping into the timestream and causing all these events to happen.

Anyway, there was a thing that was done to get readers, where you ask them to send in their characters, and you write them in. I got two, another writer named Iranu and a kid younger than myself named Tarkaahn. I took these characters and made them my own, I loved my cast. The story sucked, but I am still doing stuff based around the concepts of these characters.

The characters were Xander, my self-insert. Cloak, arm blades, farmed evil creatures which I though were adorable. Kind of a dork whose character was all over the place, but I liked him. His element was Earth and Shadow. Originally, it was vague and he had shadow powers, but I based his look of earth matoran, so he became a hybrid, something I would do a lot. I even made a system for it.

There was Iranu, the fan character. His was all shadow, but I had it diluted so it was not evil or really powerful. I made this character the driving force of the main quest, a mask-maker, being a smart, no-nonsense guy, somewhat anti-social, but still worldly. I probably bugged this guy half to death asking him to keep on reading this...

Then there was Noki, an original character. She was a vortixx treasure hunter working for Iranu. She was huge, badass, and eventually developed a romance with Iranu. She was even more no-nonsense than Iranu, and the one who generally administered Dope Slaps within the group.

The other fan character was Tark. He was a toa of popcorn. Yeah. When I was going to retcon the story, I was going to make him into a toa of agriculture, who was just insane. And his mask allowed spontaneous musicals to happen. Really really stupid as a character, but really really fun to write.

Last was Casanuva, probably one of my favorite characters in anything I have ever written. He was Iranu's younger brother, a toa of magnetism. I loved Casanuva partially because he was so adorably sleazy (there was a Christmas story that got eaten by the Internet where he cultivates mistletoe!), and partially because when I made him, the magnetism was Just For Pun. But then, I realized that it was really badass. He was probably the one who was the most powerful without any Marty Stu powers. Of course, the mask I made up I had to tell my self a LOT had different powers, since I called it the 'Mask of Seduction' (which of course did not work on Noki), which I realized was a mask of basically date rape, so I explain it to myself that it just accelerates romantic interactions.

Last was Kyra. Her character was non-existant, and now that I think about it, kinda unintentionally sexist. A Mind Rape victim with tentacle hair who was Xander's love interest. Besides loving the tentacle hair enough to spin the concept into its own race in the book I am writing, nothing much to say about this character.

There were a few others, like Vasiic, who if Bionicle ever reboots, is pretty much my signature character, and Exode, his shape shifting partner, who I liked. I really like Vasiic because it is what I think one of my most original names.

All in all, the writing was terrible. The story was terrible. Some of the characters are terrible. Overall, though, I'm kinda still proud of it. The aborted sequel, Twilight Dawn, more so.

My first fanfic ever was a disaster. It was an Avatar The Last Airbender romance story about Aang and Katara.

First chapter: Aang confesses, Katara feels the same way, everyone parties. Second chapter: they go on a walk and Katara finds potent aphrodesiacs which can be mistaken for cherries and ends up humping Aang's brains out (nondescripive; she tackles him behind a bush). Third chapter: Sokka and Suki meet under extremely coincidental circumstances.

This is bad fanfic 101, where is the hilarity? Well, in a later chapter, Aang's daughter Kayleigh (yep, those aprodesiacs were there for a reason) finds a flying lemur (not Momo, he's dead) and clings to its tail. This flying lemur is Ozai's reincarnation, with all his thoughts and such. And it plans to kill Kayleigh as his revenge on the Avatar for killing him (the fic was written before the show ended). So Aang murders every last lemur he can find and serves them to his friends.

I should mention the novel I wrote in middle school.

Oh man. So. It was about high school students. (I knew nothing about high school, being in middle school.) They were nerds and being bullied. (I basically knew nothing about the more serious parts of bullying and was mainly basing it off the kind of bullying you'd see on cartoons. You know; wedgies, shoved into lockers, stolen lunch money.) One of the nerds ended up committing suicide. (Knew almost nothing about suicide or the reasons behind it.) So the other nerds try changing the system and stuff like that. There was also something with one of their classmates being a complete psycopath and trying to kill them? (Knew nothing about psycopathy and mental illness either.)

I'm probably not describing why it was awful very well? It was basically me trying to tackle all of these very serious and complicated issues with very little understanding of what I was getting into.

That and the main character was a complete self insert. Except male? Which confuses me because self inserts and Mary Sues when you first start writing (especially at the elementary and middle school age) tend to be your ideal self and I've never had any reason for my ideal self to be male.

It occurs to me that this isn't a funny old shame either. Eh. If I could erase the memories of this story from my brain I would. As it is, I took one of the puns for a comic recently and I may have some of the characters cameo somewhere just so I can brutally murder them.

I don't know if any of mine are actually funny or which is the "funniest". There seem to be a lot of old things written by hand that I wrote in my mid-to-late teens that are chock full of not only author avatars but author's-friends avatars, and chicks-the-author-really-wanted-to-bone avatars.

And needless to say the (well and truly God Mode) author avatars rescue the chicks the authors want to bone from an impending calamity such as alien invasion and they hide out in the hills with an assortment of stuff that is a mix of what the author and his friends actually had (I was obviously aware of "Write What You Know" back then) and what they'd dearly love to have and survive the alien menace (sometimes by using their super-cool psychic powers!)

I remember one far longer story that I started when I was around 8 that involved aliens and space exploration that had me and pretty much all my friends and family in it and it got kind of convoluted and silly as I killed off characters based on friends/family who pissed me off and then brought them back to life later when I'd gotten over my temper tantrum. Some somehow came back from deaths that I had designed to be as un-come-back-from as possible...

I regret that I lost that MS over the years because I suspect that if I read through it now, I'd have a good old giggle.

I'm not sure what's the funniest of my old shames are.

Maybe it's because I'm at the age where many writers would be writing their old shames.